Prepare for record air fares, some travel insiders are warning. Two of the main reasons: demand for travel seems irrepressible, with many of us still making up for journeys lost during the Covid pandemic; and problems with aircraft mean that the supply of seats is lower than expected.
Understandably passengers want to save cash – and in the US one controversial trick for finding cheaper tickets is known variously as “skiplagging”, “hidden-city flying” and “throwaway ticketing”.
Skiplagging is a technique to exploit one of the anomalies of air travel – that flying from A via B to C is often cheaper than simply flying from A to B. For example, I flew this week to Kansas City in the US. I paid £735 return for a ticket travelling via Atlanta on Virgin Atlantic and its partner Delta. But were I to be going only as far as Atlanta the fare would typically be £200 more.
The principle of skiplagging is to take advantage of such oddities. You buy a ticket pretending you want to go from A via B to C in order to get a cheap ticket – but then instead of changing planes at the connecting point, you deliberately “no-show” for the onward flight.
The method claims to be able to save hundreds of dollars. But the airlines don’t like it, and claim users are breaching their contract for travel.
These are the key questions and answers.
Why should flying a shorter distance cost you more?
It sounds a bizarre concept: surely more flying should cost more, not less? But there is some method behind the airlines’ apparent madness.
A London-Atlanta nonstop flight is a premium product, for which people are prepared to pay more. In contrast, London-Kansas City requires at least one stop along the way and several different airlines will get you there – I could fly on American Airlines via Chicago, for example, or United via Washington DC.
So to grab a slice of the London-Kansas City market, the airlines have to cut their prices so that the overall flight costs less than the sum of its parts. That same phenomenon plays out thousands of times a day. And it works in Europe and many other parts of the world besides the US.
Presumably there’s a catch or two?
Many. Let’s start with luggage. If you check in baggage for the aircraft hold, it’s normally checked through to your final destination (though oddly not entering the US). So If you wanted to fly this coming Friday from Manchester to Munich on Lufthansa, you could in theory save £150 by pretending you wanted an onward flight to Prague.
But any checked baggage would be destined for the Czech capital, which could take some explaining if you intended to go no further than Munich. So skiplaggers take cabin baggage only.
Even then you could find that, on a busy flight, your bag is taken from you at the gate and checked through to Prague.
Next, if you try this outbound on a return ticket, the whole of the remainder of the trip will be cancelled.
For example were I to hop off at Atlanta rather than transfer to Kansas City, and turned up at Atlanta hoping to be flown back to the UK on the originally appointed day, I would be told in no uncertain terms that by failing to fly the full ticket I had invalidated the journey and it was cancelled without refund.
As many of the people who were unfortunate to be flying last month can testify, flight disruption seems to be increasing. If there’s a problem with the Manchester to Munich flight, Lufthansa could say: “No problem, we’ll fly you from Manchester via Frankfurt instead to Prague.” This would leave you hundreds of miles from where you intended to be.
What is the airlines’ view of skiplagging?
They hate it, because they say it disrupts their perfectly legitimate right to offer whatever prices they wish on a particular journey.
Airlines say anyone who tries it has breached the transportation contract, and they reserve the right to pursue the passenger for the amount they should have paid. Were they to charge you the difference in fare, it could run to hundreds or even thousands of pounds.
In practice, they don’t usually take passengers to court. They think it would generate lots of bad PR. The public are likely to be outraged by a situation analogous to someone ordering fish and chips who decides to leave the chips.
But there are other measures airlines can take. They can go after frequent flyers who they detect to be skiplagging, strip them of status and cancel their savings of points.
If a travel agent is involved, they may send an ADM – an “agency debit memo” – which is a quick way of gaining some recompense and persuading the agent not to do it again.
Do airlines ever take “direct action” on the day?
Yes, they can. British Airways used to have a Morocco flight that went from London Heathrow to Casablanca to Marrakech. There was lots of competition from London to Marrakech but not much to Casablanca. Therefore the fare to Marrakech – a longer distance – was almost always cheaper than to Casablanca.
The airline got wind of the fact that some travellers were taking cabin baggage only and nipping off the plane at Casablanca. So at the Casablanca stop, cabin crew checked the boarding pass of everyone trying to leave the plane to ensure than no-one was trying to cheat the system.
Another technique that is reported to have happened in the US when a potential skiplagger is identified: meet the passenger at the gate after flight one, and walk them around to the departure gate for flight two.
Surely it is fair to exploit anomalies in the system?
Some say the more people who exploit skiplagging the better. They argue that this is a problem of the airlines’ own making: if carriers simply offered reasonable fares everywhere, the issue would go away.
But skiplagging has consequences. Leaving a seat empty means increasing the per-person impact on the environment from that flight. Also, a skiplagger who has no intention of being on board a particular flight might inadvertently block someone who really needs to travel from making that journey.
The onward flight might also be delayed, with ground staff waiting for a passenger who they know is somewhere in the airport …
Are there other forms of transport where the same concept applies?
Yes: coaches serving airports. Normally there’s a big premium on airport services. A ticket from Bristol to London Victoria Coach Station, on a bus that calls at Heathrow, may well be cheaper than one only as far as the airport.
On trains, split-ticketing is the converse of skiplagging: it involves buying two or more separate tickets for a single journey. It is perfectly legal.
